books.google.com - Digital technologies are engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textural and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia and YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation,...https://books.google.com/books/about/Structures_of_Participation_in_Digital_C.html?id=2q3ZAAAAMAAJ&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareStructures of Participation in Digital Culture

Structures of Participation in Digital Culture

Digital technologies are engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textural and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia and YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation, but the changes run deeper and wider than these novel organizational forms.

Digital culture is also about the transformation of what it means to be a creator within a vast and growing reservoir of media, data, computational power, and communicative possibilities. We have few tools and models for understanding the power of databases, network representations, filtering techniques, digital rights management, and other new architectures of agency and control. We have even fewer accounts of how these new capacities have transformed our shared cultures and our understanding of and capacities to act within them. This volume addresses these issues and supplies the demand for a comprehensive critical framework that places these developments in context.

From inside the book

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Page For example, the notion of "open source" was originally a concept known only in
technical circles: It describes a way of distributing software so that it can be
shared, reused, and modified by subsequent programmers and users (see
Weber, ...

Page Although open source software is the usual reference point here, the history of
encyclopedias can also be reframed through this lens: In the beginning,
encyclopedias relied on the One Smart Guy model. In ancient Greece, Aristotle
put pen to ...

Page Although elements of open source software practice could probably survive in a
TC environment, the certification requirement would gut one of its core values:
the right of anyone to run modified software. Although a TC-compliant Linux is ...

About the author (2007)

Joe Karaganis is a program director at the Social Science Research Council in New York. His work focuses on changes in the organization of cultural production in the digital context and on the intersection between information policy and social practice. He directs two programs at the SSRC: Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere and Culture, Creativity, and Information Technology.